Full-Text Articles in Philosophy

Acquisition Of Knowledge Through Narrative In Argumentative Processes, Guillermo Sierra-Catalán

OSSA Conference Archive

The objective of this investigation is to study the role that the narrative speech act plays in relation to the acquisition of certain types of knowledge within the frame of argumentative processes. An inferential scheme that regulates the acquisition of knowledge is exposed, as well as an analysis of the reasons adduced. This is used to develop an evaluative method for the argumentative “goodness” of narrative texts. Finally, the particular case of literary narratives is analysed.

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

African American Existential Heroes: Narrative Struggles for Authenticity argues for the development of existential authenticities and their impact on African American self-identity constructions in three African American literary classics:

Richard Wright’s The Outsider, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. For that purpose, the introduction puts forward the aforementioned topic; defines the major terms, authenticity, existentialism, and African Americanness; identifies the three texts to be studied; explicates its methodology; studies the anagnorisis of each text in relation to the existential crisis; accounts for the existential philosophers used, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre ...

From Poe To Cortázar: Spheres Of Influence And Circles, Luis F. Garcia

Pathways: A Journal of Humanistic and Social Inquiry

A close examination as well as an exploration of the influence Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Circles provided to Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar in his short story Axolotl, From Poe to Cortázar: Spheres of Influence and Circles provides a comparison and contrast of the overall thematic elements and literary resources of these texts and authors.

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Through a detailed analysis of the various modes of argumentation employed by Aristotle throughout his natural scientific works, I aim to contribute to the growing scholarship on the relation between Aristotle’s theory of science and his actual scientific practice. I challenge the standard reading of Aristotle as a methodological empiricist and show that he permits a variety of non-empirical arguments to support controversial theses in properly scientific contexts. Specifically, I examine his use of logical (logikôs) argumentation in the discussion of mule sterility in Generation of Animals II 8, rational (kata ton logon) argumentation in his discussion of cardiocentrism ...

Functional Corporate Knowledge, Mihailis Diamantis

William & Mary Law Review

The line between guilt and innocence often turns on what a defendant knew. Although the law’s approach to knowledge may be relatively straightforward for individuals, its doctrines for corporate defendants are fraught with ambiguity and opportunities for gamesmanship. Corporations can spread information thinly across employees so that it is never “known.” And prosecutors can exploit legal uncertainties to bring knowledge-based charges where corporations were merely negligent in how they handled information. Whereas knowledge as a mens rea has unique practical and normative properties that vary with a corporation’s size and industry, corporate law treats knowledge just like any ...

Theses and Dissertations

Particle physics (and other fundamental physics research, including searches for a theory of quantum gravity) faces a problem when it comes to acquiring experimental evidence. Many theories and models make predictions that cannot be tested with current, or even prospective technology. Yet these fields continue to develop, with new models and theories regularly being introduced, scrutinized, changed, and discarded. My project aims at examining the way theories and models are constructed, adapted, and assessed in fields that lack the empirical evidence that usually grounds such tasks. I will focus on two prominent examples: string theory and attempts to explain electroweak ...

Doctoral Dissertations

There are two kinds of epistemic theories about self-knowledge: the traditional account, and the inferentialist account. According to the traditional view of self-knowledge, we have privileged access to our propositional attitudes. “Privileged access” means that one can gain knowledge of one’s own propositional attitudes directly via an exclusive, first-personal method called introspection. On the other hand, the inferentialist view of self-knowledge postulates that we don’t have privileged access to our propositional attitudes and must infer or self-attribute them instead. In this thesis I argue that the traditional view of self-knowledge, which postulates that we have privileged access to ...

Undergraduate Theses

What does Maxwell Planck's concept of phantomness suggest about the epistemological basis of science and how might a Nietzschean critique reveal solution to the weaknesses revealed? With his solution to Kirchoff's equation, Maxwell Planck launched the paradigm of quantum physics. This same solution undermined much of current understandings of science versus pseudoscience. Using Nietzsche's perspectivism and other philosophical critiques, Planck's answer to blackbody radiation is used to highlight the troubles with phantom problems in science and how to try to direct science towards a more holistic and complete scientific approach.

Qualia, The Heart Of The Mind-Body Problem And Epistemology’S Quagmire, Allison Mangan

Augsburg Honors Review

Qualia are layered and complex, a labyrinth of a concept, rife with debate as to their existence, state, and what they mean for our understanding of knowledge, relationship with the world, and ourselves. Thoughtful exploration into the complexities of what qualia are and how they relate to the mind-body problem will be wrestled with though research applied within this paper.

Theses

Abstract

Many attempts have been made by philosophers, political activists, psychologists, historians, social advocates, and others to explain the mechanisms at play in the perpetuation and resulting manifestations of systemic and institutional racism. On one side of the debate there lies a theory that there is an epistemic failure at the root of racial bias towards Blacks, white ignorance, a collective amnesia regarding what has and does take place in society, as it pertains to their oppression and isolation, like the view of philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Mills, this type of ignorance, or non-knowing, is a cognitive phenomenon ...

Betting & Hierarchy In Paleontology, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

In his Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences, Adrian Currie argues that historical scientists should be optimistic about success in reconstructing the past on the basis of future research. This optimism follows in part from examples of success in paleontology. I argue that paleontologists’ success in these cases is underwritten by the hierarchical nature of biological information: extinct organisms have extant analogues at various levels of taxonomic, ecological, and physiological hierarchies, and paleontologists are adept at exploiting analogies within one informational hierarchy to infer information in another. On this account, fossils serve the role ...

Mystical Experience And Epistemic Injustice, Jake Hudson-Humphrey

CMC Senior Theses

In this paper, we explore mystical experiences and knowledge through the application of Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice. Focusing on experiences in which the usual division between Self and Other temporarily dissolves (brought about spontaneously, through contemplative or religious practice, or through the ingestion of psychedelics), we examine the knowledge gained from these experiences in its multiple forms and discuss how the mystic, when attempting to share the knowledge she has gained, may face challenges to effective testimonial exchange which constitute testimonial injustices. Similarly, due to a cultural privileging of the rational and objective, we imagine how the ...

CMC Senior Theses

The Backward Induction strategy for the Centipede Game leads us to a counterfactual reasoning paradox, The Centipede Game paradox. The counterfactual reasoning proving the backward induction strategy for the game appears to rely on the players in the game not choosing that very same backward induction strategy. The paradox is a general paradox that applies to backward induction reasoning in sequential, perfect information games. Therefore, the paradox is not only problematic for the Centipede Game, but it also affects counterfactual reasoning solutions in games similar to the Centipede Game. The Centipede Game is a prime illustration of this paradox in ...

Being And Structure In Plato’S Sophist, Colin C. Smith

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Being and Structure in Plato’s Sophist is a study of the metaphysical notion of being as it is at play in Plato’s dialogue the Sophist, and the senses in which Plato’s conception of being entails further accounts of ontological structure and goodness. While modern metaphysics primarily concerns existence, ancient metaphysics primarily concerns what grounds what, and in this dissertation I consider the nature and value of Plato’s understanding of being as a notion of ground rather than a principle of existence. I argue that Plato conceives of being in the fundamentally unified sense of participation, which ...

Glancing Back At The Camel’S Hump: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Saudi Family Therapists’ Dual Epistemologies, Rana M. F. Banaja

Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

Since family therapy was brought only recently to Saudi Arabia, studies exploring the field in this context are few. This dissertation will be the first to focus on the self of the Saudi Arabian family therapist (SAFT). In particular, it will be the first to pay close attention to SAFTs’ ways of dealing with the differing and, perhaps, incompatible epistemologies of Saudi culture and religion on one side, and systemic thinking and family therapy on the other. This study seeks to shed a phenomenological light on what informs SAFTs and what influences their work. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), I ...

Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation investigates the potential of linking intersectionality and leadership theories utilizing a theoretical bricolage research strategy. In order to explore a theoretical merger between these two disparate disciples warrants a preliminary understanding of how the production of knowledge has constructed a long-standing epistemic bias against marginalized perspectives. This analysis will seek to illustrate how androcentrism pervades the corpus of intellectual thought and the resulting impact which extends beyond the traditional canon of epistemology to the field of leadership. Intrinsic to this analysis will be an exploration of social identity and how it interacts with larger social environmental factors such ...

Casting A Sheep’S Eye On Science, David M. Peña-Guzmán

Animal Sentience

Marino & Merskin review evidence that sheep are not just passive and reactive creatures. They have personalities that vary from individual to individual and endure over time. It follows that we must rethink what it means to study them scientifically.

Jon P. Radwan

This essay highlights the intersubjective dimension of ethics, aligning Lonergan’s cognitive pursuit of objective truth with a Platonic and Christian understanding of communication as interpersonal love. After an introduction to Lonergan’s epistemology, Plato’s description of rhetoric as love directs attention to how meaning and our fellow subjects help constitute our subjectivity. Critical thought advances toward truth via language and symbolism, and this mediation process ontologically grounds individual subjects within tradition and community. Just as there is an inherent ethic within knowing, so is there a self-justifying communication ethic uniting objective truth with community bonding. In St. Paul ...

Designing Epistemic Concepts, Luke E. Elwonger

Philosophy Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research

The analysis and theorizing about concepts like “knowledge” and “justification” has played a central role in much of epistemology in the past half century. This dissertation argues for the claim that we should understand this conceptual concern as one of design. Concepts are tools and the concepts of interest to epistemologists must be those that we can best use in service of our epistemic interests. On this understanding of the conceptual project, we determine the content of epistemic concepts, not by consulting our naïve linguistic intuitions, but by determining what concepts will best help us express and enforce the epistemic ...

Secrecy And Intelligence: Introduction, Kathleen Vogel, Brian Balmer

Secrecy and Society

The catalyst for this special issue of Secrecy and Society stems from a workshop titled “Secrecy and Intelligence: Opening the Black Box” at North Carolina State University, April, 2016. This workshop brought together interested scholars, intelligence practitioners, and civil society members from the United States and Europe to discuss how different facets of secrecy and other practices shape the production of knowledge in intelligence work. This dialogue aimed to be reflective on how the closed social worlds of intelligence shape what intelligence actors and intelligence analysts, who include those within the intelligence establishment and those on the outside, know about ...

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Agnotologies of Modernism examines the productive role of ignorance in the work of several key modernist authors. Borrowing concepts from speculative realist philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and Jane Bennett, as well as such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, the dissertation endeavors to read modernism epistemologically, and treats ignorance as an active and creative force that often plays a key structuring role in the imaginative world of the text. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notion of a “black box,” the study shows how ignorance can be transposed into an ontological entity which can then be attributed positive ...

Honors Projects

Theses

Debates about the epistemic significance of peer disagreement are highly idealized. Some have even suggested that genuine cases of epistemic peer disagreement never in fact obtain, since even seemingly trivial differences in experience and attitudes can bias evidential processing. This thesis defends the view that these criticisms are overstated: the problem is not that epistemic peer disagreements do not exist, but rather that we lack an account of how it is possible to identify our epistemic peers. I argue that attention to the sense of humor provides one important source of evidence regarding the experiences and attitudes of others that ...

God And Interpersonal Knowledge, Matthew A. Benton

SPU Works

Recent epistemology offers an account of what it is to know other persons. Such views hold promise for illuminating several issues in philosophy of religion, and for advancing a distinctive approach to religious epistemology. This paper develops an account of interpersonal knowledge, and clarifies its relation to propositional and qualitative knowledge. I then turn to our knowledge of God and God's knowledge of us, and compare my account of interpersonal knowledge with important work by Eleonore Stump on "Franciscan" knowledge. I examine how interpersonal knowledge may figure in liturgical practice, in diffusing the problem of divine hiddenness, and in ...

Being And The Good: Natural Teleology In Early Modern German Philosophy, Nabeel Hamid

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

This dissertation examines the problem of teleology in early modern German philosophy. The problem, briefly, is to account for the proper sources and conditions of the use of teleological concepts such as design, purpose, function, or end in explaining nature. In its modern guise, the status of these concepts becomes problematic with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, which reconceived the physical world as fundamentally inert and purposeless and rejected the medieval view of the world as governed by goal-directed powers. This disssertation argues that the reception of the new science in Germany was deeply conditioned by ...

Reasons To Realize That We Can’T Really Know About Unrealized Possibilities, Joseph Klein

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The chief purpose of this essay is to defend the position that we do not have knowledge of unrealized possibilities. I do this first by laying out some basic concepts concerning modality. Then, I use these ideas to show that modal knowledge has sometimes been assumed without sufficient justification. Next, I provide my own argument that we have no access to such knowledge based on our understanding of evolutionary development. Finally, I discuss some potential implications for this argument and propose one way that we could reinterpret modal intuitions to explain why we came to think we had modal knowledge ...

L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs Publications

In studying topics in cyber conflict and cyber-security governance, scholars must ask—arguably more so than has been the case with any other emergent research agenda—where the epistemological and ontological value of different methods lies. This article describes the unique, dual methodological challenges inherent in the multifaceted program on global cyber-security and asks how problematic they are for scholarly efforts to construct knowledge about digital dynamics in world affairs. I argue that any answer to this question will vary depending on how one perceives the social science enterprise. While traditional dualistic perspectives on social science imply unique challenges for ...

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

This decolonizing interpretive analysis serves to provide bicultural researchers the opportunity to engage and challenge the dominant literature on pedagogy, curriculum, methodology, and schooling. Bicultural researchers have been forced to navigate the dialectical social terrain of dominant/subordinate tensions and contradictions, as part of their process of survival, as subaltern or subordinate cultural citizens and critical scholars. This study seeks to deconstruct Eurocentric epistemicides that compartmentalize knowledge, particularly within the fields of theology and education. Western Christianity tends to separate God from humanity. This is an epistemological problem. The nature of this study necessitates a process by which critical theory ...